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I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.
Seamus Heaney
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Seamus Heaney
Age: 74 †
Born: 1939
Born: April 13
Died: 2013
Died: August 30
Actor
Author
Linguist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Playwright
Knock
Shape
Shapes
Antigone
Take
Restructure
Would
Clout
Verbal
Strictly
More quotes by Seamus Heaney
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Seamus Heaney
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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I shall gain glory or die.
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The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.
Seamus Heaney
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
Seamus Heaney
Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.
Seamus Heaney
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
Seamus Heaney
Write whatever you like!
Seamus Heaney
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
Seamus Heaney
The end of art is peace.
Seamus Heaney
If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Seamus Heaney
Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking
Seamus Heaney
But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
Seamus Heaney
But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
Seamus Heaney
It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.
Seamus Heaney
In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
Seamus Heaney
Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.
Seamus Heaney
